This is a truly dramatic debut volume of poetry from a very talented newcomer who is calling attention to an overarching issue. William Brewer grew up in Oceana a small Wyoming County town in the coalfields of Southern West Virginia. It has been given the nickname Oxyana because of the way that drug companies and local health-care providers have flooded the town with prescription painkillers, especially Oxycontin, and the way that they have become people killers. Oxyana was the name of Brewer’s first chapbook which won the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for those under 30. Brewer is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. This volume is a winner of the National Poetry Series. “The poems are elegiac, viscerally present, and reveal the interiority of those struggling at the margins of our society. William Brewer is an immensely gifted poet.” Eduard C. Corral. “I Know Your Kind endures as a riveting and poignant debut where Brewer captures the horrors of substance abuse, the spiritual rigors of recovery, and ultimately, the fraught relationship between an obliterated landscape and self-obliteration.” - Plume.
Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2017. 75 pages, trade paperback